Part III: King of Terrors
The Infernal Machine
Chapter 15: American Girl
Content warning: This story contains explicit content and supernatural sex that may offend some readers. All depicted characters are 18 years or older.
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Barbara stared out the car window and watched the overcast landscape transform around them with each passing mile: skyscrapers and overpasses to skate parks and suburbs, east across the mile-long bridge over Lake Washington, and onward through the tunnels and concrete noise barriers into the pine forests. When she was in kindergarten, she thought most of the world was a fairy-tale forest, with cities jutting through the treetops here and there while highways like this one wound like black tar rivers beneath the evergreen branches. A logging truck shadowed the window as it passed them, and she tried to focus on the misty green slopes beyond the treeline, to imagine that world-spanning forest.
“Seriously?” David was saying while he drove. “A gas explosion?”
“They’re saying an earthquake ruptured a line,” Isabel replied from the passenger seat, “and the blast swept through the tower. Most of the bodies aren’t recoverable, and the Delanne Institute’s in financial turmoil.”
